EU moving closer to Facebook ban | Hacker News Reader

EU moving closer to Facebook ban

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129 pointsAdriaanvRossum103 comments

The amusing thing is: Schrems2 basically established that any US based company storing EU citizen data is not allowed because US agencies have access without any due process, even if the data is stored in the EU.

It's just that the entire industry has decided to ignore the implications and go on like that ruling never happened.

Well, almost. There is a serious effort by some companies to move off of AWS/GC/Azure and various other SaaS services.

European Microsoft Azure operates as an independent German entity, or was some time ago at least.

As far as I know they initially essentialy leased out the technology to an independent operator, but stopped doing that quite a while ago. No hard source to point to tough.

Deutsche Telekom. I also remember it being stopped, but looks like it has been revived.

Could you point me to the source. I was under the impression it is dead and Deutsche Telekom now collaborates with Google Cloud on the so called Sovereign Cloud [1].

[1] https://cloud.google.com/t-systems-sovereign-cloud

Deutsche Telekom [0]: "In den DE-Versionen Daten-Speicherung der Kundendaten ausschließlich in sicheren Rechenzentren in Deutschland mit der Zugangskontrolle durch den unabhängigen Datentreuhändern T-Systems"

This sounds as if Microsoft would not have access to data, which is managed by T-Systems independently. But there might of course be something in the fine print.

My browser is set to prefer English, cookie banners etc. are working, but the rest of the site won't switch, cannot find a button to manually switch either.

[0] https://geschaeftskunden.telekom.de/digitale-loesungen/softw...

This was winding down about 12 months ago, unsure of the current status of it.

It's the same model they use for operating in China.

From an operational perspective this makes things very hard - as you don't actually get access to the services - you need to run an operator from the independent company through the troubleshooting / mitigation for any incident.

Why don't they all do that? They have EU "businesses" for tax reasons already. So not starting it for privacy reasons (and no money reasons) as well?

You probably need different staff or something, pretending to be a separate EU company but blindly running all the software and scripts that the US team tells you to doesn't really achieve much.

Exactly! For tax reasons they even create dozens of complex structures...

The US gov and others are talking about banning TikTok for the exact same reason, why is EU "banning FB" any different?

If not US than China(tiktok) so where is the European social media app that respects its users? I really look forward to it.

I thought that was the reasoning behind location locks with quite a few cloud providers, like Firebase for example.

I doubt this would end well for the EU if it actually got banned. Social media platforms like FB, Instagram, TikTok..., are too ingrained in people's daily lives for them to just accept it without causing a massive backlash for politicians (who likely also use it, as well as their families).

Not to mention WhatsApp is used by a lot of mid-sized companies as a method of rapid communication (for whatever weird reason), as well as small local businesses that rely on it to directly communicate with their customers (the same type that uses gmail for businesses purposes). And just used in general by everyone is most of the EU region.

“Without a massive backlash?”

I’d actually be surprised if this was true.

I’m probably addicted to scrolling social media. I’m tired of it. If it was forcibly removed from my life and there was no social pressure for me to use it. I’d be happy.

I’m sure I’m not alone.

You're not. :)

Plenty of people would say the same of something like alcohol. Outright banning it tends to be relatively unpopular though.

That said, this is pretty different since you'd just get social pressure to move to an EU alternative.

Unlike alcohol there are substitutes. If Facebook was banned, people would just use the next social network.

They would all move to the same one, including restaurants, events, meetings, etc? Everyone's older family members included? Sounds like it would be disruptive.

Come on, I would lose contact with most of my friends if facebook is banned in Europe. Let's stop being obtuse and ignore the fact that there are actual users of the product.

And if you were told it would be banned next month, you'd all find another way to contact each other. You'd congregate around something in much the same way you did around WhatsApp and Facebook, way back when.

It would be inconvenient for many people to migrate but let's stop being obtuse and ignore the fact that there are alternatives that comply with local laws.

There's a real risk for communities, though. A group of communities currently on Facebook may see their members flee to several independent alternatives, which will kill any cross-group participation. That stuff has the ability to break communities which may never grow back in the same form.

I'd much rather see Facebook and Whatsapp follow the law than see the general population get an even worse feeling about data privacy laws. Banning these platforms plays right into the books of the tech giants.

I'd prefer compliance and I think Meta would too.

On potential societal damage, we already risk so much by being beholden to a few private companies rather than a protocol. Meta could turn off Facebook or major features overnight without warning. Governments should do everything they can to encourage diversity of providers.

If it all relies on Facebook, are the friendships even there?

Yes

Yeah. I think the point is I would only lose those friends on facebook.

But you worked for Facebook. Most people have friendships outside of that.

Only recently, its irrelevant

I disagree. Just having FB in your public CV makes you an interested party already. Given you were sec lead at a FB project it is even conceivable you hold FB stock, which would make you a very interested party.

I advise you to add a COI statement if you make future posts/comments about Facebook/meta/Zuckerberg. It is just good practice.

No it's not, there's a reason I joined the company and it's because I always liked and used the product. Not everyone is a hater.

COI is nothing to do with love and hate. We need to know your position. Conflict of interest is important.

Honest question, do you consider these people actual friends or internet acquaintances.

One thing I hate social media for is keeping me hyper connected to thousadns of people, it actually takes up a lot of time. I'm not saying I'm not grateful for having thousands of new friends, but I can also see that the people in front of me get less attention because of it.

It feels like a bit of a hidden cost of social media often unaccounted for.

I do wonder am I saving time because it's now enough to just message someone for their birthday rather than go see them; However I'm now messaging tens if not hundreds more people for their birthday then before.

Real friends

Someone who answers your request to stay in contact on another platform with "no" is not your friend.

I don't know.. I'd hope enough of us value their privacy to be able to support this. I'd sooner expect Facebook to give in and just process their European data in Europe.

Probably depends on where.

Here in Germany I suspect it would be mostly met with shrugs and "good riddance". Sure there would be some teenage tears, but that's to be expected.

>Not to mention WhatsApp is used by a lot of mid-sized companies as a method of rapid communication

They'll move to something else within a day, while regular people will need two.

All this stuff is easy and fast to replace - and it will be replaced almost literally over night. It has happened to messaging services and social networks in the past, and it will again. MSN and ICQ disappeared incredibly fast, as did social networks like schülerVZ/studiVZ/meinVZ in Germany.

Yep... the tragedy would be if only you got banned from facebook/google... but when all your friends get banned, they/we all move together to a new platform (and let's be fair, most of us europeans have most of our friends nearby, within the EU, and the ones outside have a lot of EU friends too).

So yeah... a few weeks of panic, and everyone would be using "something else".

I can't visit Truth.social because I'm not in the USA. Not that I'd want to, but still. I haven't heard too much backlash yet.

Banning these services won't deter people from using them, though. I think those 4% worldwide revenue fines will be much more useful for getting those companies to comply than a hard block.

> I think those 4% worldwide revenue fines will be much more useful for getting those companies to comply than a hard block.

I can guarantee you that no corporation on the planet is going to pay 4% of their global revenue without the EU member states sending troops in to enforce the court ruling.

Then that’s tantamount to banning the company because all their assets in the EU would be liquidated.

Yep, this is how trade wars are started.

Google got fined ~3.5% ($5b) of their global revenue by the EU in 2018. I didn't see any troops. Granted, they're still fighting that one in court.[1]

It's not looking good for them though, with courts already having upheld another $2.8b fine against them (from 2017).

Also note that "not paying" a fine is not really an option if you have business in the EU or countries friendly with them. They will quite literally just take it out of your accounts in the end. If you don't wish to have your business disrupted by that, you better pay before that happens.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-faces-eu-in-court-ove...

I think there would be some backlash from users -especially youngsters, but adults have bigger issues they’re facing in the EU: economy, inflation, jobs losses, war.

That said, how can people, except for those up to 30, have survived up until 20 years ago without this and then suddenly feel great loss without it?

There are alternative methods of communication. Granted they’re distributed…

> That said, how can people, except for those up to 30, have survived up until 20 years ago without this and then suddenly feel great loss without it?

Addiction. It's not uncommon even on HN to see social media compared to running water.

You got a good point there.

They are compared, but not the same. It is a metaphor but not a good one:

Cut access to social media to someone and maybe they will get angry for a short period of time and then they will move on.

Cut access to water and people will get angry and then if the situation continues they will get angrier and in the end you will have protests.

I actually don't think it's as ingrained as people make it out to be; it certainly _was_ present at a time, but poking around on various Google Maps entries for restaurants and shops that come up checking in various EU cities, while a lot of them do have Facebook pages as their sites, the pages are mostly abandoned.

COVID likely helped with this (can't help but notice quite a few have last posts around or just before 2020), but even before that you can see it's slowing.

Regarding WhatsApp, it should be pointed out that the article addresses this and suggests WhatsApp likely wouldn't be affected immediately as it has a different data controller (GDPR term I believe). But even if Whatsapp were on the chopping block, most hotels/hostels/other businesses I've worked with in the small to medium size have multiple chat apps they list (WhatsApp, Viber, Instagram, and more rarely, Telegram) so I suppose such businesses would be quite okay and at worst would just have a mild annoyance.

As an aside, I'm not sure I know of people who are actually big fans of WhatsApp so much so as it's just sort of what you use cause back in the day, it's what you used for international calls. There are a lot of alternatives now that are pretty solid with actual fanbases for the products; anecdotally, I don't think I know anyone that actually _likes_ using WhatsApp, it's more just something they use. Feature wise, WhatsApp feels very aged and has not really kept up with competing applications.

All in all I think it wouldn't be such a big deal, and if there were a ban, I do think it would probably be okay in the long run for most people; the communities would adjust (as they always do) and there are _plenty_ of alternatives.

Maybe a couple of weeks of turmoil but in the end people would adjust to it, like they always do.

There are more than enough tech-savy interested startups that would love to fill the void left by Meta, Instagram, TikTok & co. I would not be surprised if social media becomes state-operated infrastructure at some point, as it is so crucial to everyone. Social media without ads paid by taxes.

This would be a good move for the EU. If they faithfully clone a competitor, especially one more utility-focused (i.e. taking public funding) than marketing-focused, Americans would ditch facebook faster than people left Digg.

I have doubts about the EU's ability to execute on that, but all they need to do is give people the exact same shit without the contamination of Meta, and make data import from facebook seamless.

France and Germany tried their hand at a publicly funded Google (search engine) competitor [0]. It is also worth reading up on EU projects such as Galileo and Gaia-X. If history is any guide, it would not likely go according to plan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quaero

> France and Germany tried their hand at a publicly funded Google (search engine) competitor [0].

From linked wiki page:

> The consortium was led by Thomson SA.

As an ex-Technicolor employee, it doesn’t surprise me that this went nowhere.

Not sure about Galileo, but Gaia-X is not an EU project. It's a project started by a group of private companies, just because they are companies located in the EU, it does not make it an EU project.

Anyway, Gaia-X will definitely be a flop, or rather, will remain vaporware IMHO.

I honestly hope that Facebook is banned so that all the events and organizational stuff can go to a more open and honest platform.

Good luck trying to recreate the social graphs you created thanks to fb

I have exactly 0 of these, so recreating should take roughly 0 seconds, give or take.

Thanks for your data point. There’s a billion people who don’t fit yours though

Social graphs? Did you mean relationships? We don't have to use FB terminology when we have perfectly fine words already.

He worked for FB as security lead of the Diem/Libra/Novi blockchain/crypto/abandonedProject.

The term “graph” in this context comes from mathematics, not Facebook: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_theory

Kind of inhuman dont you think for a discussion about people?

So long as there's advance warning, any connections that are actually worth having can be maintained outside of FB.

I stopped using facebook 4 years ago and I’m not missing anything.

> to a more open and honest platform.

But does such a platform exist? are there open/decentralized social networks, and how to they deal with the issues of content moderation and privacy?

Maybe Friendica[0], diaspora[1], or something else there[2](filter by macro) [0] https://friendi.ca/ [1] https://diasporafoundation.org/ [2] https://fediverse.party/en/miscellaneous/

Wow, overblown headline.

Facebook is not "being banned", Facebook is simply being required to protect EU citizen's information the same way every other company is.

Part of that means not subjecting them to warrantless surveillance, since the US government has repeatedly and aggressively said that the data any company has from anyone not living in the US has no such protection. If this hurts Facebook's business they should go and talk to the US government about why it has decided to cause such harm.

Obviously this makes the US government (and gruber and similar tech pundits) complaining about TikTok complete bullshit. TikTok is literally doing exactly what Facebook is doing, why should that data be any less accessible to the PRC gov than Facebook's data is to the US?

For your last point, because the US and EU are allies while China is not. Plus China's human rights abuses are a whole other league from western countries.

Yes, the EU and the US are allies, which makes the wanton abuse of EU citizen's right to privacy less reasonable, not more.

[edit: wanton not wonton, though wontons are good]

nah, Facebook is never going to literally go offline as it would be too disruptive, but it'll hopefully accelerate the push towards processing all European user data on the continent itself.

The lesson from this should be that regulation should be proactive. Privacy frameworks and safeguards to make sure EU citizens have EU protections ought to have been in place 10 years ago when these platforms were going global.

Would this technically mean that any eu Facebook user is not visible to us users?

More likely you have to connect to EU servers from the US to view EU users. But this is not really any more complex than adding another sharding split. Since model weights and embeddings are widely considered to not be user data either (they are derivative works) I don't think the EU's requirements have any real impact to privacy or FB's ability to operate.

All this regulation will only entrench the big players who can afford expensive software engineers to run globally distributed systems that respect privacy regulations. You can't just spin up some servers in us-east-1 and focus on building your app now. Your data is still getting vacuumed up, just on the EU continent instead of in a US datacenter. But NSA/Five Eyes has everywhere wiretapped anyways so your data is equally as unsafe as it would be in a US datacenter.

> regulation should be proactive

you really risk thwarting innovation when you do that though

Innovation in what? Biotech? Energy storage? Or chat apps

Easy to be bullish but let’s not forget how much amazing technology has been created to support that “chat app”. Some of that tech was basically a paradigm shift. Some of that technology for sure is applied to projects solving energy storage or biotech.

To name a couple of contenders: react and cassandra. But there are dozens more.

This is the sad state of facebook. Their business is awful but the research coming out of there is top notch.

I meant in general. Innovation happens everywhere really. But in this case I would say innovation in communication.

Imo it feels like the start of a trade war. Until Russia and China stepped in, EU US relations have been progressively declining. If both of our adversaries were more patient, relations would have eventually weakened NATO.

I think a lot of this discussion, ignores geopolitics.

If the EU really causes serious pain to the likes of Facebook/Google all that money spent on lobbying will come into play. Especially now, the US holds a lot of cards with respect to the EU, especially Germany.

My guess is that this issue will resolve with an agreement with some cosmetic changes, but will still, in actuality, allow the US to get at the data it wants.

Yeah, the EU has pretty much no competing companies unlike Russia + China.

And it is now completely reliant on the US for LNG imports, meanwhile the Euro is collapsing since it has to be sold en masse for USD for those imports, and also for Rubles for Russian gas now that Russia only accepts Ruble payments.

Turkey is also on the verge of complete collapse and is currently holding over ten million refugees for the EU.

This winter through next spring looks like it will be a complete disaster.

Clickbait.

Schrems 2 is old news [1]. And my guess is a new US-EU deal will be struck[2] because US currently is in stronger position (geopolitically) than EU.

But if that fails - we would still have Facebook EU, Whatsapp EU, Instagram EU etc. Which IMHO is worse than current state.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/09/facebook-told-it-may-have-...

[2]: https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-us-strike-preliminary-dea...

Great. Time to start loading stocks of companies providing VPN services.

If this comes to fruition, a round of beer for everyone!

Yeah, death to Facebook :D

No, seriously though. It may well impact my sales, but it's a price I'm willing to pay.

Taking Schrems2 to the logical consequences, will we, from EU, have to leave HN or github too?

What FB products though? WhatsApp?

whatsapp is a product of Meta, not fb

Facebook is the umbrella org for all the products.

Meta is the umbrella org, listing both Facebook and WhatsApp under "what we build" on their site.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22facebook+parent+company+m...

https://meta.com/

Who cares. They'll always bet Facebook to most folk.

Would it ever come that far?

Fingers crossed!

Pff, just another promise they won't deliver. Too good to be truth.

GDPR 49/1a explicitly states possible workarounds (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-49-gdpr/):

"In the absence of an adequacy decision pursuant to Article 45(3), or of appropriate safeguards pursuant to Article 46, including binding corporate rules, a transfer or a set of transfers of personal data to a third country or an international organisation shall take place only on one of the following conditions:

    a. the data subject has explicitly consented to the proposed transfer, after having been informed of the possible risks of such transfers for the data subject due to the absence of an adequacy decision and appropriate safeguards;"

Does someone here know why does this apparently seem not to apply? Couldn't FB just ask for a consent?

Just after Russia did it, so they'll be in a good company. Why do politicians always have to decide this kind of stuff for people? I view it as basically because they are evil. If an adult consents to have their data accessible to FBI or whatever, in exchange for being able to post selfies and click the cow, let them. Nope, Putin/EUtin think they know better than you.

A little bit off-topic: Do people here satisfied with DuckDuckGo?

Pretty much yeah, sometimes I feel its a bit off but not going back to Google or Bing

DuckDuckGo is still (using) 'Bing' but using privacy as a meaningless buzzword.

duckduckgo is making money using microsoft online advertisment company and mostly using bing and it runs on azur... plz guys...

Google also hasn't been working too well for me lately, so yeah.

I use DDG as my primary search engine, but satisfied wouldn't be how I would describe myself, because even at it's worse, Google is still better than all the competition, and I find myself using !g a lot.

DDG, Yandex, Bing, and other indie search engines just don't seem to have the broad range of Google for a lot of obscure searches. It probably doesn't help that a lot of information nowadays is behind places like Discord servers and other random blockades.

EDIT: And yes, Google UI and functionalities are getting worse and worse, but the their search results are still the best (even if you have to scroll down).

it's not great, but it's not that much worse that google

and has none of the user-hostile bullshit

We hear a lot of DDG users liking the better results and apps on https://you.com

Downvotes? It is a question.

It's already banned around here.

  $ grep facebook /etc/hosts
  127.0.0.1 facebook.com www.facebook.com
  $

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